VyRT was established in late 2011 as a
startup company by entertainer
Jared Leto. His aim was to let musicians create live experiences and broadcast them on the Internet, with the ability to share their work without having to rely on the prevailing sponsor-based model. Its inception came from some frustrating experiences Leto faced with American rock band
Thirty Seconds to Mars in streaming their own live events. On December 7, 2011, VyRT streamed the Tribus Centum Numerarae, the 300th show of the
Into the Wild Tour by Thirty Seconds to Mars, which garnered the band the
Guinness World Record for most live shows during a single album cycle. The show marked the launch of VyRT as an online platform. At the 2012
O Music Awards in June, it was awarded Best Online Concert Experience. After the first streamed events, VyRT transitioned to a new site, expanding to
digital distribution and
online shopping, selling
video downloads/streaming,
MP3 downloads/streaming, and
e-books. It also began to feature
social networking. The team rebuilt the website in
Ruby on Rails and expanded its capacity on
Heroku. The artists featured on VyRT included
Gerard Way,
Linkin Park,
Greek Fire,
Ryan Beatty,
The Janoskians,
Ryan Cabrera, the
Jonas Brothers, Boy Epic,
Ivy Levan, and
Brendan Brazier. Later, it began to stream films, beginning on August 31, 2013 with special screenings of the documentary film
Artifact (2012), followed by the psychological horror film
The Shining (1980) on February 9, 2014. In August 2014, it was announced that VyRT would exclusively broadcast worldwide the performance from the
Carnivores Tour by Linkin Park and Thirty Seconds to Mars, scheduled on September 15 at the
Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. Before Thirty Seconds to Mars took to the stage, the VyRT platform was hacked. Jared Leto was forced to delay the performance by Thirty Seconds to Mars by an hour to resolve the issue. The audience eventually lost approximately three minutes of actual stage time, but the set list was shortened. Leto later claimed that a "piracy stream" was responsible. The event included "real-time social community engagement from audiences worldwide". In November 2014, the documentary series
Into the Wild premiered on VyRT. The series was produced by Jared Leto and Emma Ludbrook through the production company Sisyphus Corporation. In May 2015, VyRT premiered episode one of indie pop musician Boy Epic's docuseries
Telling Secrets in response to a Mars fan campaign to get him on the platform after he made a song inspired by
Suicide Squad (2016). Further episodes weren't released for unknown reasons. On October 9, 2016, Thirty Seconds to Mars exclusively released
Camp Mars: The Concert Film on VyRT. The film was directed by Leto, documenting the first Camp Mars event in 2015. By 2020, VyRT was still open but not receiving new livestreams or VOD content, with the last major livestream being an AT&T sponsored concert live from the third annual Camp Mars event in Malibu on August 12, 2017. The event itself was hosted on AT&T's website and their Facebook Live. An initially planned partnership with
Fandor, announced as part of Leto becoming Chief Creative Officer of the platform on May 21, 2017, never came to fruition. Mars fans still used the site to communicate with other fans and host watch parties for VyRT VODs, with some hosted officially by VyRT. In December 2020, the site redirected to a page on the official Thirty Seconds to Mars website formally announcing the end of the platform, thanking the user base and hinting at a new project from the same team. ==Services==